Rancho Cucamonga launches RC Responds app for smart phones

RANCHO CUCAMONGA - The city has launched "RC Responds," a new mobile app available for iPhone and Android smart phone users, which residents can use to report various issues to local government.

Using the app, residents can notify city officials about problems such as potholes, graffiti, noisy neighbors, weeds, and overgrown vegetation. The new app is an extension of the city's Citizen Response Management, or CRM system, called Rancho Responds.

Residents are able to find a specific problem category, such as animals, parking, fire issues, trash, traffic signals, and graffiti, among others. Users can provide details about the problem, and share a related photo or document with officials.

"One of the challenges in maintaining a city like Rancho Cucamonga is we can't see everything all the time, so the benefit to us with this app is that if a resident sees an issue that needs to be repaired, they can take that picture, send it to us and that allows us to know exactly what the problem is, and we can respond quickly to get that response," said Public Works Services Director Bill Wittkopf.

"Every resident in the city can provide us the information that they're seeing out there and make it much more timely for us to respond, and much easier for residents to get that information out to us."

A GPS locator is attached to each service request. Officials said the new system feeds to the proper city department officials, and if a problem isn't solved in a reasonable amount of time, the notification gets sent to a supervisor.

"I think this helps us to be more efficient because residents automatically give us more information. When public works searches for graffiti, this gives us exact GPS coordinates and makes it easier on the residents. It also provides us more information so we know more about the problems and solve them in a timely manner," said Deputy City Manager Lori Sassoon.

The city has a similar feature to report problems digitally to City Hall, via its website, and on RC2Go, a city smart phone app released earlier this year that features directories of retail and restaurants in the city.

The release of the RC Responds app, Sassoon said, is meant as a soft launch, with the city beginning a marketing effort to city residents in the next month. Sassoon said residents will have more functionality for issue notification in RC Responds, than in the earlier app, though both apps are meant to compliment the other.

With more and more Internet users gravitating from the use of desktop browsers to mobile apps to navigate and use the web, city officials say RC Responds is a way to keep pace with the trend.

"I think that the next phase in web development is the idea that more people are using their mobile devices than they are on their desktops, and we need to keep up with that pace, so that we can serve residents in the way easiest for them," Sassoon said.

RC Responds runs on Civica software, the product of web-based information management system company Pixelpushers, Inc., based in Newport Beach.